


Well There's Your Problem Episode 49.5: The hololive EN Minecraft Tunnel

by Wizard_of_Uncertain_Library



Category: Hololive, Minecraft (Video Game), Well There's Your Problem (Podcast), hololive English
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Mythical Beings & Creatures, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27955460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wizard_of_Uncertain_Library/pseuds/Wizard_of_Uncertain_Library
Summary: A podcast about engineering disasters analyzes the hololive English Minecraft tunnel project. Presented as a transcript.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	Well There's Your Problem Episode 49.5: The hololive EN Minecraft Tunnel

(SCENE: A leftist podcast on engineering disasters, with slides.)

JUSTIN: Okay, well I've started recording.

LIAM: Alice says she'll be here in a second, she's just setting up Audacity.

JUSTIN: Alright. We'll just wait for her to show up, and edit this bit out.

LIAM: Fuck it! Leave it in.

JUSTIN: It wouldn't be Well There's Your Problem without half-assed editing. I figure people have come to expect it now.

ALICE: I'm here, I'm here. I just had to pop out to Tesco before it shut. I'm not doing this podcast without gin.

JUSTIN: Alright, uh, lets get started.

(Pause.)

JUSTIN: Hi, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters. I'm Justin Roczniak, I'm the one who's speaking right now. My pronouns are he/him.

ALICE: I'm Alice Caldwell-Kelly, I'm the one who's speaking now. I'm @AliceAvizandum on Twitter; I'm also on the Trash Future podcast. My pronouns are she and her.

LIAM: Hi, I'm Liam Anderson, I'm @oldmanders0n on Twitter, I'm the one who's speaking now. I will fight assholes making transphobic comments in the comments. The whole of Philly is in COVID lockdown right now and I have all the free time in the world, buddy.

JUSTIN: Okay.

(Justin pulls up the first Powerpoint slide. It is a concept render of Elon Musk's Las Vegas Loop.)

LIAM: Oh, my pronouns are he and him.

ALICE: Ah! Elon Musk's ridiculous, hare-brained scheme to build a shuttle system out of just regular cars, made by his own company. And it's a callback to a previous episode.

LIAM: I love when we do callbacks.

JUSTIN: Today's episode is on the Hololive EN Minecraft server tunnel.

ALICE: I can't belive we're doing a podcast on fucking VTubers.

LIAM: Alice, we told you we were doing this like two weeks ago. You took the screenshots for several of these slides.

ALICE: I know! And I still can't believe it.

JUSTIN: Okay. So--

ALICE: It was obviously going to happen sooner or later. VTubers have blown the fuck up in 2020. The shark girl, in particular.

LIAM: People are getting so mad at Gawr Gura for just how ridiculously successful she's gotten in such a short space of time. Other streamers are just, getting ridiculously jealous. Toxic streamers can fuck off. You play videogames for a living, you're just mad that you didn't think of it first.

ALICE: We're watching the collapse of late stage capitalism. The future is utterly bizarre. I was promised flying cars!

JUSTIN: So Hololive is this Japanese streaming company, right. Like an agency or something, except that all the streamers have these anime avatars, which I'm assuming is some kinda proprietary technology. And so they set up this Minecraft server, probably because Mojang is the only company who doesn't do copyright strikes on people playing their game on the internet.

LIAM: I think it's pronounced Mojang.

JUSTIN: Mojang.

ALICE: And of course it becomes the biggest fucking thing on YouTube, like almost immediately.

(Justin advances to the next slide. It is a screenshot of the Hololive JP server, a bright, chaotic and highly elaborate city built in vanilla Minecraft.)

JUSTIN: So this is the Hololive JP server. This is the Japanese, uh, counterpart to the English streamers we're gonna talk about today. They've been working on this for, uh, several months, now, at least.

LIAM: So I looked up a couple of videos of this, and it's somehow genuinely impressive. One of them has built an entire Gundam, in her own likeness, out of iron blocks.

ALICE: Pekora, the fuckin'... bunnygirl, shitgoblin--

JUSTIN: Surely it's just a matter of mining enough blocks.

LIAM: Oh, no, it's better than that. She's got a fuckin' villager concentration camp.

ALICE: Excuse me?

LIAM: I'm serious.

ALICE: She's using slave labour?

LIAM: No. It's even better than that. It turns out, if you get enough villagers in one place, the game somehow gets fooled into thinking it's a village, and starts spawning spawning iron golems. Which you can farm basically indefinitely for an unlimited source of iron.

ALICE: I could totally see Pekora as some kind of fascist dictator. I'd much rather believe she was running some kind of like, horrible gulag where she forces them to smash rocks for her all day.

LIAM: And after that, she... *sighs*

JUSTIN: This is the sound of a man who's fallen down the VTuber rabbit hole.

LIAM: No. NO. Listen.

(Justin and Alice laugh out of sync.)

LIAM: Hold on. There's a video I saw, where she's got this zombie, and she's got it into a wooden boat, and she climbs into the boat alongside the zombie and she's just rowing this boat across the grassy plain--

ALICE: What the fuck?

LIAM: --rowing this boat into a like, gruesome execution chamber full of villagers, and she just lets the zombie rip into them so they become zombies too, so she can cure them all later with gold apples, and then she forcibly transports them to a shop where they'll give her better trading prices because the game thinks she rescued them.

JUSTIN: Sounds like the villagers should unionize. 

(Laughter.)

ALICE: Just, like, a novel way of dealing with worker's strikes. Lure all the factory workers into a room under the premise of pay talks, then sic the living dead on them.

JUSTIN: Alright. So Hololive decides to branch out into English. But the problem is, the English streamers don't speak Japanese, right? Or not great Japanese, anyway. Whatever. So they put the five of them on their own separate Minecraft server. The problem is, they dont quite have access to the same resources.

(Next slide. It depicts the Hololive EN Minecraft server. A rectangular wooden house sits on an empty stone plain.)

(Raucous laughter.)

JUSTIN: So, they decide to get all five together and do some kind of collaboration, right. Cause they need a project to get started on. You know how it is in Minecraft, right, where you can do whatever you want, and deciding what you want to do is the hard part.

ALICE: Sure.

JUSTIN: So they decide to just dig a really long tunnel.

(Next slide. It is a photograph of a road tunnel at night. Inside is a car on fire.)

LIAM: Oh boy.

JUSTIN: This is not it.

LIAM: Oh. I was going to say, Minecraft's graphics have gotten way better since the last time I played it.

JUSTIN: This is the Logan Airport car fire, from November. I thought it would be funny to throw that in there.

ALICE: Ah, yes. What could be funnier than a burning car, billowing smoke into an enclosed roadway tunnel and potentially killing dozens of motorists?

JUSTIN: Luckily, nobody was harmed. Uh, anyway, so the Minecraft girls figure the best thing they ocould possibly build is to build a huge-ass tunnel, right? This is back in October.

ALICE: As you do.

LIAM: What are they building the tunnel to? Usually when you build a tunnel, it's a tunnel TO somewhere. Or connecting two points.

JUSTIN: I'm getting to that. Next slide.

(Next slide. It is a beach in Minecraft, with a wooden door placed in the side of a sandy hill.)

LIAM: Oh, of course.

JUSTIN: So before this happens, right, the streamers have never worked together before, in Minecraft. They just joined at separate times and did their own thing. So Gar Gura--

ALICE: Gawr Gura. With a W.

LIAM: Gawwwrrr Gura.

ALICE: Don't forget the W! It's important.

JUSTIN: Right, Gar Gura. She's like a shark girl, right? So her idea is, she's going to build Atlantis. The entire lost underwater city, of Atlantis.

LIAM: *snerk* Sorry, continue.

JUSTIN: She has practically no Minecraft experience before this, right. So the first day, she's just getting her bearings. Now in Minecraft, you have to tech up, right? You can't just start building skyscrapers right away, you have to make like wooden tools first, then use that to make stone--

LIAM: Roz, our audience is leftists and nerds. I'm 99% certain they all have at least five hundred hours in Minecraft apiece.

ALICE: And leftist nerds.

JUSTIN: Right. So the problem is, Gura has kind of an ADHD problem. So halfway through this process, she finds a horse, and decides to take it for a joyride. Now, two things. One, horses in this game can go pretty fast. And two, she doesn't have any kind of sense of direction, right. So a couple minutes later, she's unable to find her way home. So she does what any reasonable person would do in this situation, and say, "Fuck it. You can't be lost if you don't know where you are."

LIAM: She's a genius. Promote this shark.

JUSTIN: So she pitches tent by a beach and decides she'll just build Atlantis here.

ALICE: Hence the tunnel.

LIAM: From the slide, I'm going to guess Atlantis didn't quite live up to expectations.

JUSTIN: This is just, like, temporary shelter, right? That's fine. You need somewhere to stay the night while you're "teching up" to like diamond tools. You can see here--hold on, let me get out the John Madden.

(Justin draws annotations on the slide in red pen.)

JUSTIN: Over here on the left, she's got like a farm, with some animals in it for food, and over here's a wooden door leading to a nice solid house. Normally you don't, uh, you don't build the front of your house out of sand, that wouldn't pass muster in Philly. Health and Safety would never sign off on this construction. But this is Minecraft, so it's fine.

ALICE: At this point I'm thinking she should just press F3 to get her coordinates, and ride the horse vaguely in the direction of zero by zero.

JUSTIN: She can't, because, uh, I think someone in chat told her pressing F3 reveals your IP address, or something.

ALICE: Oh of fucking course.

JUSTIN: So, uh, next slide.

(Next slide. An illustration of five Hololive EN girls together in Minecraft.)

JUSTIN: So the five of them finally get together, and it occurs to them that Gura's house is some distance away from everybody else's. I couldn't quite work out how far, exactly, uh, but I think it's gotta be at least a mile. About a mile. So their solution this problem is to dig a mile-long tunnel through solid rock.

(Laughter.)

ALICE: Not a road, or a raised monorail or something. Lets just dig a mile long tunnel through solid fucking rock. I'm guessing half of them are still on, like, stone tools at this point.

JUSTIN: So they just kinda pick a spot, and start digging a tunnel. Now, it should be noted that two of the five members have no previous experience with Minecraft. The detective girl, and the uh, like Cthuluesque monster girl--

ALICE: Uh, Ame and Ina--

JUSTIN: Ame. Okay. Ame's the detective, right? or--

ALICE: --Respectively. Ame is short for Amelia Watson, or Watson Amelia, because for no fucking reason she puts her name in the Japanese name order on her channel page, and then never fucking uses it that way in practice, because sure, why not?

LIAM: Oh for crying out loud.

ALICE: And Ina is short for... Ninomae Ina'nis, again Japanese name order.

LIAM: Oh, of course.

ALICE: It's a Japanese surname, and her first name, actually, is Latin.

JUSTIN: That's good. That means she's probably educated.

LIAM: I feel safer just knowing she's on the team. Nothing can possibly go wrong now.

ALICE: She's some kind of Lovecraftian tentacle monster person... but she's human, apparently?

LIAM: Don't look up the name of H.P. Lovecraft's cat. That guy was racist even by the standards of own time. And he lived in America in like the 1920s, so, you know, pretty fuckin' racist.

JUSTIN: Okay. So, The five of them decide to just dig their way to Atlantis.

LIAM: At this point, how far has she got building Atlantis? Like when they get there, are--

JUSTIN: Uh, not. At this point she hasn't actually started on Atlantis.

LIAM: Oh of course not.

JUSTIN: She doesn't tell them this fact until the tunnel project is well underway, and it's too late to back out.

(Raucous laughter.)

JUSTIN: I think they're all expecting there's like an underwater glass citadel waiting for them when they get done.

ALICE: They're building a bridge to nowhere, basically. Sorry, a tunnel to nowhere. Like one of those roads the British forced Irish peasants build during the famine, just as like a grim boondoggle so they had an excuse to actually feed some of them.

JUSTIN: Okay. So they start by digging diagonally down. The five of them are all there together, for some reason. You don't really need five people to dig a tunnel in Minecraft, right, it's not like the Channel Tunnel or something. You just need like, uh, one guy with a bunch of iron pickaxes. The rest are kinda superfluous, and they realize this partway through. I think they end up building a three-man wide tunnel, with two guys left over. So one is working as a kind of scout on the surface. Uh, Ame, the detective, she's just up there, and she's riding the one horse around to try and find Gura's beach shack.

LIAM: Oh God.

ALICE: This is how we got into this mess in the first place!

JUSTIN: It's fine, though, because it turns out Ame is actually somewhat smart, so she thinks ahead and writes down her starting coordinates so she can find her way back if she gets lost. I think Gura never remembered to write down her base's coordinates. So she's out there trying to locate the place they're actually meant to be digging to. But they've already started digging, by this stage. So only three of them are actually digging, and the last one is acting as a sort of foreman. 

LIAM: Who's the foreman?

JUSTIN: Gura.

(Laughter.)

LIAM: Oh fuckin' Jesus.

JUSTIN: No, it gets better. So everyone just kinda assumes Gura knows the direction to her own house, right. They're also assuming like she's like at least started on Atlantis. So they're digging this tunnel together, Gura's giving them directions, and progress is going pretty well. It's nearly an hour into the stream and they've finally started digging. There's just one problem. They're digging the wrong way.

(Laughter.)

ALICE: Of course they are.

JUSTIN: It turns out Gura doesn't actually have a sense of direction. Like she can't reliably tell apart left and right. She also doesn't really know how to read map coordinates. At this point she's gotten over her fear of pressing F3, so she's looking up her coordinates, and she notices that, oh, wait a minute, we're going the wrong way, right? We should be going along the X axis, rather than the Z axis.

ALICE: I'm sure it's fine.

JUSTIN: They're essentially digging at a right angle to the direction they should be going. So Gura's like, guys, uh, we're going the wrong way. At this point they've been digging for a good twenty minutes in what has turned out to be completely the wrong direction, and it's already like an hour into the stream.

LIAM: So we're dealing with basic design flaws, incompetent staff, and massive time-overruns. Minecraft is more realistic than I thought! Now all we need is unnecessary worker deaths and the city can start using this to accurately plan urban construction projects.

JUSTIN: Actually--yes, I'll get to that. So they decide the best thing to do is just kinda wall up the end of the tunnel with cobblestone, and hook a left. Now Ame has hit upon the idea to save them some time, by digging her own tunnel from the other end, from the Atlantis end--

ALICE: "Atlantis". You can't tell but I'm doing finger quotes.

LIAM: Oh, I can tell.

JUSTIN: --she's going to dig a tunnel, by herself, hoping to connect on to the tunnel the other three are now digging. Gura can't join her to help out, because she's the only one actually streaming this. She's basically like the cameraman for the whole affair, so she has to hang back so the viewers can see what's going on. None of the other four thought to stream this.

ALICE: Sure. Why bother to stream any of the most popular VTubers playing the most popular video game of all time?

JUSTIN: Later collabs they do, and you can actually play them all at the same time and sync them up, and you can see the episode from different viewpoints. But not this one.

ALICE: That's... harder than you think. Because they're not physically in the same location, so like Ame hears Gura's voice delayed because of like, lag? And Gura hears Ame's voice delayed. So the audio doesn't sync up at all. You can have multiple streams open, you just have to mute all but one and hope for the best.

JUSTIN: Uh. Yes. Okay, so. Obviously Gura can't go to Ame. She needs to stay there. Eventually they realize Ame has to come back, too, at some point, or she's just not going to be on camera.

LIAM: And as we've already established, Gura cannot find her own feet with a map. She'd just get lost in the forest or something and call that Atlantis II.

ALICE: Atlantis II: Electric Boogaloo.

JUSTIN: And this is assuming they can actually connect the two tunnels, which is, uh, optimistic, at best. The idea was to connect Ame's tunnel to the main tunnel, so like they meet in the middle, kinda like the Channel Tunnel, right. But bear in mind that they just spent like twenty minutes digging a tunnel in the wrong direction, so actually connecting two tunnels up from opposite ends, successfully, would be, uh, optimistic, at best.

LIAM: Sure. Okay.

JUSTIN: To make things worse, by this stage in the project, the project has already suffered three casualties. Two of those happened before they even started digging the tunnel. They decided, for some reason, to travel at night, with the result that Ame is killed by an Enderman. Gura tries to rescue her, and is also killed by the Enderman, and she drops the only map which leads to her house. Which is, you know, kinda required for the whole thing.

LIAM: Wait. Is that why they get lost? They were doing this whole project without a map of where they were going?

JUSTIN: No, because she just respawns nearby and picks it it back up. She was smart enough to have rested in a bed, at one point, in one of the nearby houses, so she just respawned there. They haven't even started digging yet when this happens.

LIAM: She literally had a map to her house and still managed to go the wrong way.

JUSTIN: And then, uh, thirteen minutes later, Kiara dies too, when the gang accidentally digs into a nest of silverfish, which apparently get pretty big in these parts. Calli is, uh, injured, but she survives. So we're like thirty feet into a mile-long tunnel and already the rate of workers killed or injured on the job is 80%.

LIAM: Ha!

JUSTIN: Now it's at this point that Ame realizes she didn't record her starting coordinates either. So I think they just kinda scrap the two tunnels idea. It was never really a tenable plan, so this is actually a smart move. Ame decides to try and find her way home, and the other four just keep on mining, right? So right away they discover the first major unexpected problem, which is that they dig into like a ravine.

(Next slide. A cobblestone bridge over a ravine. Kiara has just fallen over the edge.)

(Laughter.)

JUSTIN: So they decide to just build a flat cobblestone bridge over it, and continue with the tunnel. Now, this is Minecraft, so cobblestone is actually pretty stable, as a building material. It's cheap, it has good blast resistance, and it's hard to break accidentally. Your main danger is actually when you're building the bridge, right, 'cause you can fall down. The safest way is probably to build it off of a wall, like the wall to the right. The problem is that at the far side of the ravine, there's no wall to build off of. You can't really see from the slide, but the ravine is at kind of a diagonal, right. That's why there's a little bit of wall to the right, but it doesn't extend all the way.

(He circles the area to the right.)

JUSTIN: So the only real way across is to put each block after the other. This is kinda dangerous, because you have to be facing the end of the block. But what you can do is, you hold down shift, and that'll let you walk a little bit off the edge without falling. You can see in the slide that Ina is actually doing this, over on the right. She's got a two-wide path all the way across, and she's working on a third. She knows what she's doing. Kiara is trying to do the same. The others are just kinda hanging back, for safety.

LIAM: Yeah, I would too. It looks like Ina's got this.

JUSTIN: The problem is, Kiara is also trying to do it by holding shift. She doesn't have to, Ina's already build a path across, so you can widen it while standing on the pre-existing bridge. That would be the safest. Kiara, uh, she doesn't do this. She's trying to walk backwards while holding shift, and I guess at some point her pinky finger gets tired, and she accidentally lets go. So she falls something like 35 blocks into the ravine below. That's 35 meters, or about 115 feet. There's also lava at the bottom of the ravine, except where there's obsidian, which is the hardest known substance in Minecraft, I think. I could be wrong. Either way, you don't want to fall on that from a hundred and fifteen feet up.

LIAM: Goddamnit. This is why we have OSHA compliance, people!

JUSTIN: She wasn't even wearing more than like basic safety equipment. You can see here she's wearing an iron helmet, and some like steel toe capped boots, but, uh, that's about it. Ame, Gura and Ina have full suits of armor, and Calli has a pair of solid gold magic pants. Kiara has spent most of this project so far digging without any kind of protection, at all, and they just sort of craft her some makeshift equipment along the way.

ALICE: I'm going to take a wild guess she does not survive this fall.

JUSTIN: No. She, uh, dies instantly on impact.

(Laughter.)

JUSTIN: They name the finished bridge after her, and Calli puts up a sign making fun of her for falling off. Everyone thinks this is hilarious, because Kiara's character, uh, she's like a phoenix, right?

ALICE: Phoenix Wright?

LIAM: I-- I knew you were going to say that Alice. I knew you were going to say that.

JUSTIN: So dying all the time and coming back to life... that's like, her lore. So every time she dies they just think she's playing into her lore.

ALICE: "Every time she dies." How many times does she die before they finish the tunnel?

JUSTIN: Uhh... five.

(Laughter).

JUSTIN: Death number three happens 23 minutes later, when she's blown up by a creeper. Usually these things spawn in when there's insufficient lighting in the tunnel. Again, that's a failure of management to establish follow necessary health and safety guidelines.

ALICE: This project sounds like an OSHA nightmare. No safety railings, no emergency evacuation plan, absolutely no kind of ventilation...

JUSTIN: Sure. So at this point they're halfway through a three hour stream, and they're getting restless. This is where things start breaking down. They're just kinda digging diagonally downward, for some reason. And, uh, the workers are starting to get restless. Ame starts talking about working on other projects. She wants to build a giant golden statue of Hololive's founder.

(Alice sighs.)

ALICE: Another promising endeavour destroyed by leftist in-fighting.

JUSTIN: I'm just imagining like that hundred foot high golden statue of Chairman Mao somebody built in China, a while back.

ALICE: Whatever happened to that?

JUSTIN: I assume it's still there.

LIAM: No. I remember reading about this. The Chinese authorities tore it down as soon as they were finished because the builders didn't have a building permit from the Chinese government.

(Laughter.)

JUSTIN: Ok. So they're so focused on building the tunnel that they miss a treasure chest that's just sitting in to a minecart. Their tunnel accidentally bisects a disused railway line, but nobody notices, because they're too busy with the tunnel. Except Gura, who's kinda hanging back so she can record everyone, and she happens to spot this chest, so, uh, she loots it. There's like, two diamonds. She just sort of embezzles them for herself.

ALICE: Typical.

JUSTIN: So the problem hits another snag. They encounter a second ravine. It's not very wide, so, y'know, they can bridge this pretty safely, which they do. The problem is, the gang has gotten bored, so they decide they're going to jump into the ravine and go exploring.

(Liam sighs loudly.)

JUSTIN: Gura is the lone voice of reason here, but nobody listens to her.

LIAM: I'm gonna be so pissed if they get my girl Ina killed. She's the one sensible member of this entire expedition.

JUSTIN: No, Ina gets right into the ravine with everyone else.

LIAM: Fucking hell, Roz. I'm done with VTubers.

JUSTIN: Calli spots skeletons, and she tells everyone else immediately, but they basically ignore her warnings. It turns out there's a skeleton spawner in the ravine, and nobody spots it until they're practically right on top of it, with no escape plan for how to get back up. Ame, Kiara, and Calli are all shot to death by skeletons with bow and arrows. Ina survives, but--

LIAM: YES. Faith restored.

JUSTIN: Ina and Ame walk out looking like pincushions, and have to just brick themselves in until help can arrive. Gura builds this like wall out of diorite block, which, you know, it's fine, for a temporary structure. It's enough to stop arrows, which is what you want in this scenario. The problem is, like I said earlier, the tunnels aren't properly lit, right. Nobody is taking responsibility for securing these tunnels against unwanted intruders.

LIAM: Shame. Shame on them.

JUSTIN: The upshot of this is that while the three are running back along what is now a very long tunnel, with no gear or equipment, Ame is killed by a zombie, and Calli has to beat the zombie to death with a brick. So now the rescue party is down to two. When they finally show up, they have no equipment, and Calli and Kiara are also killed.

(Laughter.)

ALICE: This is like, Mister Bean levels of incompetence. Now I see why Hololive is so phenomentally successful. These girls are comic geniuses, and they're not even really trying to be.

JUSTIN: So, all in all this turns out to work out pretty well, because they eventually overrun the skeleton room and loot a bunch of treasure from the chests in there. They get like some golden horse armor, some other stuff, right. But meanwhile, nobody's building the tunnel. Except for Ame, who wants to run back to base to get more iron to re-equip all the miners who lost their equipment, right, which at this point is three of 'em. But she figures walking will take too long, so she just yeets herself off the bridge and dies.

(Laughter.)

ALICE: "Yeet."

LIAM: As the young folks say.

JUSTIN: Yeet, yeah. Except she survives the fall, but like, a skeleton gets her, so it works out. That's what she wanted. It's like suicide by cop, except... suicide by skeleton.

ALICE: All Skeletons Are Bastards. ASAB.

JUSTIN: However, when she does this, she also decides to move the bed up. This one bed in the tunnel is currently the respawn point for the entire team, so she wants to move it closer to where everyone is, right? Except she breaks the bed to move it, which means that for the next while until she moves it up, anyone who dies will respawn all the way back in town.

(Alice sucks in air through her teeth.)

JUSTIN: No, it's fine. They suddenly gain a boost of competence. Gura finally works out how to read her map, so they know they're going the right way. They have to cross yet another ravine, but-- but it works out fine. Somehow. They realized that they need to build a railing, like a safety railing so nobody falls off the edge, so they do that. It turns out they're nearly at the end, so they start digging up and manage to find a village, which Gura recognizes as somewhere near her house.

LIAM: Wait. How far is Gura's house from where the tunnel actually ended up?

JUSTIN: It's a ways.

ALICE: So, wait. The tunnel doesn't even lead to Atlantis, which we've previously established doesn't exist. It doesn't even lead to Gura's house, which was the entire fucking goal of the project. How long have they been working on this boondoggle?

JUSTIN: Like two and a half hours at this point. It's another ten minutes walk from the, like, subway station to her house. So they get there, and rest up. But, uh, there's nothing really there, except for a chest full of Gura's stuff. So, uh, they just decide to go back through the tunnel again and head home with some of Gura's stuff.

LIAM: I'm just glad it's over.

JUSTIN: There are also four more deaths, for good measure. Ame dies falling off a giant letter H that she builds, then she comes back a few minutes later and gets murdered by a zombie, because everyone's hanging around outside at night for some reason. Ina dies seconds later because she tried riding the horse through the tunnel, but the ceiling isn't high enough for a mounted rider, because they didn't take that particular use case into consideration when they ran the tunnel. So her head is inside solid blocks for an extended period of time, which Minecraft considers as meaning you can't get any air. So she suffocates.

(Laughter.)

JUSTIN: And finally, Gura tries to help lead Ina to the tunnel after she respawns. She walks out of the house at night and is almost immediately blown up by a creeper, and then Ina is killed again by a spider. After that, they all make it back home through the length of the tunnel without any more workers getting killed. All in all, there were something like sixteen fatalities total, on a team with five people, giving the tunnel project a lethality rate of 320%.

(Next slide. Five minecraft characters in a big house. Behind them is a horse in gold armor.)

JUSTIN: So this whole project worked out pretty well for, uh, exactly one of the group. Gura gets to put gold armor on her horse. But now it's too fragile and valuable to actually ride the horse around, so she just leaves it stuck in Ame's house. She abandons her beach shack, sets up a new house underwater beside Ame's place, and uses the tunnel to bring back her stuff. She also kept the two diamonds, but she can't use them because the first thing you always want to do with diamonds is build a diamond pick, but uh, you need three, for that.

LIAM: I'm utterly amazed she made it back with the diamonds alive. Like she didn't just drop them all into lava, or have them stolen by a disgruntled construction employee.

JUSTIN: So, uh, epilogue. You've got this mile-long tunnel, full of unnecessary twists and turns, and it goes between a town and basically nowhere. What do you do with it?

LIAM: Just brick it up and never mention it again.

ALICE: Open it as like a kind of weird modern art gallery. Title it something like "The Folly of Man".

JUSTIN: What actually happens is, Ame decides what this tunnel needs is a railway.

LIAM: Oh hey.

ALICE: Train good, car bad.

LIAM: Yeah.

JUSTIN: Nobody's told her yet that Gura's abandoned her beach house. So she spends like fifteen full hours on stream over the next week, single-handedly lining the tunnel with this great railway. And a bunch of hours off-screen, too. She's showing up late and exhausted to streams, because she stayed up late working on the railroad on her own time.

ALICE: Like, imagine you're staying up until 4am playing Minecraft, and then you have work at 7am the next morning, and your job is also playing Minecraft.

JUSTIN: A bunch of that time is taken up mining for iron, redstone, and gold, which she needs to build more rails. So she ends up finding a bunch of interesting caves branching off of the tunnel, and blocking them off with a bunch of wooden doors and warning signs, for safety. Which, uh, you know. Safety good.

LIAM: See, mines are actually worth something. Unlike a subway tunnel to nowhere, which--

ALICE: Maybe they can rebrand it as a sort of underground rollercoaster.

LIAM: Maybe they can sell it for scrap. Or dismantle the railway and use it to build an overground rail line that actually connects places where people live.

JUSTIN: I mean, this is the Hololive English server. There are only five people in the entire world. You don't really need a railway to connect five houses to each other.

ALICE: But Justin. I thought "Train good, car bad".

JUSTIN: Uh... Yes.

LIAM: Alice has a point.

JUSTIN: Well, it's not actually a very good railway. This is standard, vanilla Minecraft, so you can't build trains, just minecarts. These are one-person vehicles. It's not a train, per se. The benefit of a train is that you can have multiple passengers at a time. This is more like Elon Musk's Las Vegas Loop.

ALICE: Or one of those, like, old-timey lever-operated railway carts that people use to chase moustache-twirling villains in silent movies.

JUSTIN: Everyone just takes their own cart, and hopes nobody has stopped ahead of them. If someone else leaves a cart on the line, oncoming traffic will crash into into it, and just stop. Also, there's only one line, and traffic can move along it both ways, so you can collide with oncoming traffic.

LIAM: At least they finished the line, unlike SEPTA Regional Rail. Wait, did they finish it?

JUSTIN: Yes, but.

ALICE: But...

JUSTIN: So, remember how I said the tunnel was poorly lit. It's been, uh, a couple months, and still nobody has put up proper lighting. In Minecraft, monsters spawn anywhere there's not enough lighting--

LIAM: Leftists and nerds, Roz.

JUSTIN: --and basically you have to put up torches or something, at least every N blocks, right. They don't do that. Like, multiple times during the railway's construction, Ame is riding the cart and whizzes past a creeper or something, because one of the lights is missing there. She's like, "whatever", right? She's moving too fast for the creeper to actually explode on her, so she can just zoom past it every time. It's like, "not my problem". Pedestrians can take their chances, but I guess everyone is in minecart, so this isn't an issue.

ALICE: Yes it is. God, I saw this clip recently, where... okay, so you know the problem where people leave empty minecarts on the line?

LIAM: Hold on, I'm going to look up a video of this on my phone.

JUSTIN: Yes. Ame actually recommends doing this if you want to get out at any point before the end of the line. You just kinda bail out and let the cart do its thing. Actually, it's guaranteed that the cart will stop in the middle of the line, because minecarts have less inertia when they're empty, and the propulsion system is only set up for occupied carts. Viewers convinced her to switch from one powered rail every eight squares, which would have let empty carts just run to the end where someone else will eventually pick them up, to one every sixteen squares, 'cause powered rails need gold, they're kinda expensive. So if you get out at one of the mines, which at this point is the only place worth visiting, you cart is just gonna come to a stop on the track and clog it up it for everyone else.

ALICE: Well, there's also another problem, which is that monsters can actually climb into carts and can't get out. So our friend the creeper from earlier actually climbs into an abandoned cart, and just sits there. And the poor person to discover this is not Ame, but Ina, who finds out the hard way when she's riding the rail and crashes into the creeper, who promptly explodes on her, as creepers are wont to do. Ina does, there's a chunk of the railway now missing. It's an absolute mess.

JUSTIN: Oh. Well. I told you so.

LIAM: Oh God. I'm watching a video just now of them building the railway. Why are there so many twists and turns in the track? Why couldn't they dig the tunnel straight in the first place?

(Laughter.)

LIAM: The railway goes up a slope at one point, and then down again like moments later, so she has to put like powered rails on both sides. You have a pickaxe, Amelia, why can't you just dig a straight line? Who designed this?

JUSTIN: You're assuming anything about this project was "designed".

ALICE: So what have we learned from this disaster?

JUSTIN: Well... is it really a disaster?

LIAM: Roz, five people died. Some of them multiple times.

JUSTIN: True.

LIAM: The moral of the story is, don't hire inexperienced unpaid volunteers for an unplanned, unnecessary engineering project, and then ignore basic safety procedures the entire time. God damn.

ALICE: Do you ever think we're taking Minecraft VTubers too seriously?

LIAM: No.

JUSTIN: No.

LIAM: What sort of example are they setting for all the kids watching YouTube who want to be civil engineers when they grow up?

(Next slide. It's a meme image of Amelia Watson with bags under her eyes, captioned "I DON'T NEED SLEEP - I NEED MINECRAFT".)

JUSTIN: Oh, I forgot this slide. That was meant to go with the other thing.

(Next slide. A black-and-white photograph of a crumbling bridge.)

JUSTIN: Okay. Next episode is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Anyone have anything they want to plug? Or...

ALICE: Listen to Trash Future podcast.

LIAM: Or don't.

JUSTIN: Listen to Well There's Your Problem. A podcast about engineering disasters. Uh. Subscribe to our Patreon to receive bonus episodes. Which are mainly not about Minecraft.

LIAM: Yeah.

ALICE: Bye everyone!

JUSTIN: Okay. I'll stop recording now.

**Author's Note:**

> Well There's Your Problem podcast:  
> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPxHg4192hLDpTI2w7F9rPg
> 
> Hololive English Minecraft playlist:  
> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeO2ZsBh8qm7oNiAhtaulx2FJ9bmSwjtN


End file.
